“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God…”

– Revelation 22:1

Are the Science…

How can a person doubt that we live in a vigorously populated universe? I’m not sure how I first subscribed to this notion, but I suspect it was one of the lessons I learned during those afternoon teas with Uncle Jesus and my “imaginary” little old British ladies.[1] Or, it is equally possible that I came to believe that there are millions of planets teeming with intelligent life deep in the velvet of the midnight sky simply because it is the inescapably logical extension of a larger idea: that our Father in Heaven, while loving and generous, is never wasteful (after all, He recycles everything) and would not likely have expended such a wealth of matter and energy for aeons of time across infinite space just to give us earthlings, so recently arrived and rarely deserving, a starry, starry night.

“Logical,” of course, is the operative word. You see, while I believe God is vastly/ immeasurably/infinitely smarter than any of us, or even all of us combined, we do – one by one – eventually learn that to act illogically is to live in a fool’s Paradise, and our Heavenly Father is no fool – He never operates on a whim. Never. And, since the logic – the science – of the universe He created must, perforce, flow from Him just as surely as the inspiration found in a moving hymn or stunning sunset. In other words, the operating, actual rules of physics must also, by definition (assuming, of course, that you believe in a Heavenly Creator), be the actual rules of God, Himself, and we do ourselves – and truth – a profound disservice when we dismiss demonstrated physical reality just because it conflicts with some long-held dogma or doctrine, however venerated it may be. “Though science courses from the Source//Who spawned, as well, the spirit//The Source cannot be proven//So, they socialize over coffee//And miss the point.”[2]

Unfortunately, it is a rare thing, indeed, when we hear a scientist discussing the nature of God, so it was particularly refreshing when the popular media started talking about the “God particle,” also known as the Higgs Boson, a few years back (though I should here note that many scientists loudly poo-pooed the designation as silly then, and still do).[3] Now, bear with me a moment while we get into the weeds of this: the “Higgs Boson” is a “flash in the pan” sort of impossibly small particle that, in and of itself, is not all that important, but the fact that it can be detected, as was so recently proven in the Large Hadron Collider, has enormous significance because, for it to exist at all, there must first exist something infinitely greater, the “Higgs Field,” which is described as a vast circular skirt (or “sombrero,” since the scientific models show a big bulge in its center) of energy particles/waves that are constantly proceeding from the very center-point of the mass of creation to its very edges; a never-ending Mexican Hat Dance of universal ripples gliding inexorably across the inky pond of space.

and the Spirit…

Now, having said all that, allow me to shift the light from science to spirit for a moment and consider something that might, at first, seem entirely unrelated: the oft repeated idea of “living water,” or the “water of life,” which is surely one of the most cryptic and mysterious concepts in the Bible. According to the site Openbible.info, there are twenty-nine scripture verses about “living water” and exactly one-hundred about the “water of life.”[4] Isaiah,[5] Jeremiah,[6] and Zechariah[7] all mention “living waters” in some form or another, the book of Revelation is overflowing with citations,[8] and perhaps the most famous Biblical reference of all is found in the story of Jesus and the “woman at the well,” when He, having no dipper of His own, asks her for a drink and then uses the opportunity to invite her to partake of the living water “and never be thirsty again.”[9] But, all that said and for all the mentions in our sacred writings, what, exactly, are all these people talking about? Just what on earth is this living water, anyway, and how the heck do we get some?

I suppose almost all Judeo-Christian seekers have asked this question at some time or another, but probably not for very long since, this side of unwieldy theological dissertations, there is very little to go on. Many writers speak of it in vague generalities, but none explains it in any tangible way. To be honest, I never really gave the idea much thought, myself, until I backed into it when – just like my Uncle Jesus epiphany – it grew out of my ever-evolving daily prayers.

If you happened to read my “Uncle Jesus” post, you are already familiar with the part of my prayer that seeks to expand my embrace of – and supplications for – our cousins (i.e., everyone) from the neighborhood to the city to the world.[10] But, if one is going to presume to pray for those who are both the beloved spiritual children of God, Himself, and the literal physical family of His Son, Jesus Christ, it strikes me as advisable to first ask for guidance in aligning with Divine will. It is surely, after all, the over-arching goal of all sincere prayer to coordinate with the will of God. Even Jesus began with “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…”

So, I begin simply with a thank you to our Heavenly Father – whom I perceive to be both at the center of all things, as well as within my heart – for the day ahead and all the opportunities and challenges it contains. Then, in concert with my angels, I ask Him to please accompany us as we go from “moment to moment and place to place, task to task and person to person,” that whatever we may choose to be, do, say, or write, is in accordance with His leading; that every joule of energy we may expend is used to accomplish His desires. Then – and this is where, for me, at least, the science and spirit begin to merge – I ask for His help in aligning myself as perfectly as possible with the steady flow of His living water, that I might drink deeply from those energizing gifts of the spirit He sends so very far, even to our little orb of jewel-encrusted iron spinning so silently through space, isolated, but never alone.

…Two Sides of the Same Sombrero?

Now, theoretical physicists tell us that without the Higgs Field there would be no material reality at all, and that would be that; that those invisible spokes of radiating energy are the foundational warp through which the weft of coordinate forces are woven into the fabric of time and space. In other words, to go back to our earlier analogy, if those ripples weren’t constantly conducting the energy of creation on its journey outward, all of it – every star, every planet, everything down to the last atom of hydrogen – would simply cease to be. But, that said, and however true that may be, I think the physicists are underselling their idea. They’ve discovered our Father’s conveyance, but neglected His cargo, for this phenomenon – this flow from the very heart of God to each and every person made in His image – carries with it so much more, I believe, than mere being. Rather, it arrives filled to the brim with inestimable gifts pouring ever and always out upon us, even unto that day long hence when we, having finally followed His flow all the way back to its Origin, may find ourselves in awe, standing before the very Source of the Universe, Himself, to offer our thanks.

Just to make it perfectly clear, what I’m proposing here is that both the “matterizing” Higgs Field and that mysterious Biblical “living water” are actually the same phenomenon, merely seen through the lenses of different disciplines and different times, requiring different words to have meaning. After all, even if you were a Son of God who completely understood the science behind these concepts while living as an itinerant prophet in First Century Palestine, how would you even being to explain it to your flock without any common vocabulary of physics? Given His situation, the “living water” description is about as accurate as He could be. How else could He have described it, if His goal was to assure His followers that the love of the Father is always engaged, and the more we are able to align with it – the more we can drink in of His largesse – the more we will be able to utilize the gifts He so generously and constantly delivers?

But what, really, does this living water do? How are we affected as it flows through and around us? As I have prayed my prayers over the years, consciously striving to align myself with the Father, His mind, and His flow the better to absorb it, I have also gained an ever-growing appreciation of, at least, how I see these treasures. Consequently, while it is possible that there are more of them that I have yet to find and unwrap, I am settled in my personal belief that our Father has graced us with at least seven identifiable gifts, invaluable life forces to help us along. Christ asks the impossible: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[11] But then He makes it possible through these endowments that may, when fully embraced, expand our awareness a hundredfold – even a hundred times a hundredfold – thereby transforming and multiplying our otherwise merely animalistic potential into practical infinity.

Our Doting Granddaddy God

If Jesus is truly our flesh-and-blood Uncle and, according to both of them, God is His Father (if you include that overhead voice heard when Jesus was baptized[12]), then the Source in the Center must also, by definition, be our Heavenly Grandfather, and, like all grandparents everywhere, Granddaddy God is overly generous, especially considering what an unappreciative, even unnoticing, crop of offspring we truly are. Nevertheless, our Father apparently forgives and forgets, and we are the most fortunate recipients of His never-ending grace, his constantly flowing living water laden with gifts for His beloved children everywhere.

As I have come to formulate my personal understanding in each of these gifts over time, they have fallen, really, into two groups of three, plus one outlier. The first three are gifts of energy, and are absolutely necessary for the lives we lead: The energies of Love, Light and Life.

The next three are gifts of discernment and must be gifts from the Heart of God since we could live perfectly successfully without them – biologically speaking – but not nearly as well: The discernments of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Because, I presume, He wished His children to share the wonder of His vast, utterly magnificent universe – the stunning results of His astonishing artistry – He has given us the means to do so.

And, the outlier? That would be a marvelous gift arising naturally from the fruits of the first six: The gift of Hope, a loving grace note adroitly placed to complete our Father’s grand embrace of every single person.

And, all of these gifts have one extraordinary quality in common: each is universally accepted as something real by everyone – even the most cynical of philosophers – but none has any provable origin. These seven gifts of God exist simply because He said so, and I believe He said so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. Let us take them one by one:

The first, of course, is the energy we call Love. Now, you may not think of love as a form of energy, but, if so, you have forgotten your youth. Surely one is never more fulsome than when first flung into the throes of love. And as for the Love of God, well, that must surely predate all except God, Himself – even before the “Alpha” – since it is the only conceivable reason for building the Universe in the first place. You might even say the big bang was actually God’s own Love in action, and the miracle of the Love that even now continues to ride, astride His open arms, is the ability it gives Him to hold each and every one of us in His heart, one-by-one and One-on-one. “Were there not Love//Would be no fear//For there would be nothing to lose,//Would be no hope//For there would be nothing to gain,//Would be no life//For there would be no reason.”[13]

The second gift of energy riding the Father’s waves is Light, itself: physical, mental, emotional and, most mysteriously of all, the Light of Spirit. And, when I use the word “Light,” I mean it in all of its usual connotations (it is a word of many purposes). Of course, all actual light and “energies” of space (strong and weak atomic forces, gravity, the great spectrum of light energies that includes our visible light but also a great deal more) would require the Higgs Field/living water to exist in any case, but the Light of Divine flow “that passes understanding,” for those of us who believe, is also included in my definition; the alluring, consoling, protecting, adjusting, rewarding, distinctive Light of the Holy Spirit with hosts of angels under her command

And, the third of the energy gifts is that ineffable force called Life. Of course, if there were no bosons, and thus, no matter, then neither would there be any living thing. But even if the atoms and molecules required for life could somehow be assembled, I submit – in spite of recent claims to the contrary by overly optimistic biologists – that without the touch of God, the assemblage would simply sit, inert. The Love of God demands us, the Light of God qualifies us, and the breath of God gives us Life.

But, even as beautifully, lovingly created as we are, without the next three gifts – those of discernment – almost all of creation’s blessings would tragically pass us by, utterly unnoticed. Truly the keys to life well lived, the discernment of Beauty, Goodness and Truth are capacities that I presume to have come from God since I can conceive of no other possible source. Consider: it contributes nothing to our evolutionary success to be awed by the Beauty of a dragonfly or transported by the colors of a sunrise, and yet we are. Goodness? Find me any other species in all the great array of nature’s diversity that has ever even approached the ideas of “right” and “wrong” – the “knowledge of good and evil” – and yet we are consumed by such judgments from birth until our very last breath. And, Truth? Well, we could discuss the “truth of Truth” forever, but no one can deny the healthy instinct that resides within each of us for telling truth from fiction.

No, our appreciation of Beauty, longing for Goodness and allegiance to Truth are discernments that must have come from somewhere, but they didn’t arise organically. Nature cannot account for them, only Heavenly nurture. No other beings throughout the entire history of the planet have even come close to conceiving of such things, much less attaining the levels of perception necessary to build great museums to beauty, great temples to goodness or great tribunals for truth, and yet, by God’s own Grace, we have.

Finally, the seventh gift of the flow of the Father is a special one to me, because it is not carried across the universe on waves of living water like the other six I have just outlined, but springs naturally and unbidden from the human heart in response to the arrival of God’s array of largess: the gift of Hope. For – at least it seems to me – even the most destitute, downtrodden or abased of us, once attuned to the flow of God’s Love, Light, Life, Beauty, Goodness and Truth, cannot fail to find Hope there, as well. Who could remain discouraged when showered with such rich and wondrous treasure in a constant stream from a loving Heavenly Father? Hope is the bridge that carries us safely over life’s chasms, the light at the end of every tunnel, and our never-failing spiritual salve, always at the ready to embrace us with its assuaging power, to lift us up and carry us forward past the inevitable disappointments of a material life. The living waters of the Father are the fount of all hope.

I could, of course, be entirely wrong about all of this; simplistic and presumptuous in my analysis of the science of all these things, and I expect our cousin Dan, who actually studied with Dr. Higgs, will let me know if I’ve somehow slipped past the truth of things, but even if the Nobel Laureate’s ideas have nothing to do with it, there is still that Biblical “living water” to account for, and however they may be borne from the Father’s heart to ours, I believe the gifts I have described are the components of that flow.

Tools of Crystal

To receive such beautiful gifts from God, it goes without saying, is to be inspired to share them – which, after all, is why I am doing all this writing in the first place – so, once my daily prayer for alignment has harmonized my will with His as much as I can manage, I do ask for one final gift before moving on to the rest of my prayer: a trio of crystal tools to help me share the bounty received from Him with as many others as possible; to help me multiply the fruits of His gifts, as best I can.

First, I ask Him, “please,” for metaphorical mirrors – mirrors of all shapes and sizes – that I might enlarge and distribute the wonders of Paradise I have received by reflecting the Light, Life, Love, Beauty, Goodness, Truth and Hope out in as many directions as possible, as much of the time as possible, and to as many of my fellow travelers as possible.

Secondly, I ask for lenses to gather the light and focus it into dark corners where fears form and shadows linger, or to illuminate the gifts of Beauty, Goodness and Truth whenever and wherever I find them.

And thirdly, I ask for prisms to unfold the light, for nothing more perfectly demonstrates, at least to me, our Father’s love of beauty than the rich jewel colors of His unfolded light; the rainbow of His designing; a million colors in the Divine spectrum provided for all of us. And, I put it to you that, once such beauty has been seen and appreciated by His children – has delivered a foretaste of the infinite possibilities residing in His Heavenly paintbox – the gentle pull of such a Divine Designer, Caring Maker, Generous Host, and Loving Father is well-nigh irresistible.

Prayer, as I said above, is really an attempt, for me at least, to align my mind with God’s, to do my best to see and follow the path He has placed before me that I might become the me He would have me be. And so I begin every day by asking to be optimized in His flow, the better to see and understand His direction. Then, fully aligned and equipped – my metaphorical toolbox at the ready and my mind in a state of worshipful allegiance – I turn my supplications to the causes of the Mother Spirit, the needs of others, and the issues of the day. But, dear cousins, that part of the story will have to wait until the next and last of this unintended series exploring my daily prayers, when we will also consider the unavoidable question, “What is He thinking?!? How could we humans – frail, foolish and corruptible as we are – possibly be worthy of so much Divine attention?”

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sharing your time with me as I continue to climb the learning curve of the blogosphere, and, as Pope Francis is so fond of saying to the crowds at the end of his Sunday prayers, “Have a good lunch!”

[5] Isaiah 58: “10 if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. 11 And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire with good things,and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”

[6] Jeremiah 2: “12 Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, 13 for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that cn hold no water.”

[7] Zechariah 13: “1 On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.”

[8] Revelation 22:1 (epigraph); 21:6: “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.”; 7: 17: “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

[9] Gospel of John 4: 1-15: “Now when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. 4 He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ 8 For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. 10 Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ 11 The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?’ 13 Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ 15 The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.’”

[12] Matthew 3:13: “13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ 15 But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; 17 and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” Revised Standard Version

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God…”

– Revelation 22:1

Are the Science…

I have never doubted that we live in a vigorously populated universe. I’m not sure how I first subscribed to this notion, but I suspect it was one of the lessons I learned during those afternoon teas with Uncle Jesus and my imaginary lady friends.[1] Or, it is equally possible that I came to believe that there are millions of planets teeming with intelligent life deep in the velvet of the midnight sky simply because it is the inescapably logical extension of a larger idea: that our Father in Heaven, while loving and generous, is never wasteful (after all, He recycles everything) and would not likely have expended so much wealth and energy for aeons of time…